11 - All I know

  

I don’t do this for fun.

No job more taxes me than this one does.

Somewhere deep inside of me I do recognize them as human regardless of what my commander says.

They are real people with real feelings.

But they pollute us.

And if we expect to become what destiny has designed for us, we must remove them.

I am not saying killing is the right or even the best answer.

Time presses us to do something to make sure they can no longer do us harm, and we watch them die anyway.

So why not end their misery? and ours?

Do you think I get pleasure watching them day after day?

Those of them who can no longer labor for us die anyway, just not fast enough.

We cannot even shoot them fast enough to put an end to this.

So we try other things.

I see it as mercy, for them and for us, to end the slow torture we all suffer in speeding up their slow death.

Why burn them?

What else do we do?

No ditch dug deep enough can ever hold them.

To leave them would cause another kind of sickness.

Killing them is easy compared to ridding ourselves of their remains.

No, I do not look them in the eyes – no more than I would a cow I got ready for slaughter.

What is the point?

Why agonize over the inevitable?

In the end we all must die.

Some of us die with a purpose, some die to keep the rest of us alive.

Others – like these – die so we can thrive.

That’s all I know.

 


email to Al Sullivan

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

20 - Shoemaker

Image
  I am a shoemaker, but not so good a shoemaker as my father was, or his father before him. I learned from my father’s hand, yet have only a dim memory of him from those hazy times in the old country when he ran a small shop near Berlin . My father was a good shoe maker, not a wealthy one. Since he was a Jew he mostly sold to other Jews, and in Germany in those days, few Jews had wealth to spare. None the less my father earned a living, as well as the enmity of Hans, the German shoemaker who hoped not only to sell his shoes to Germans but to us Jews, too. Hans hated my father long before any of us heard about the Nazis or understood fully who and what they were. I think now Hans envied my father’s ability, fingers that could mold leather in a way few other men could then or since. Hans often called my father “a dirty Jew” in the market place just to keep others from doing business with us. This being Germany, many already blamed us for losing the Great War, so th...
Read more

12- We turn to dust

Image
   If I have so much, why do I feel so poor? We live in this place because they do not let us live anywhere else – and then blame us for living as we do. They call us greedy, and say we earn our livelihood in dirty professions, as if we could earn our keep in any other way. I count coins at night because I have so few to count, and must squeeze what I can out of each, knowing I will be blamed for being cheap. They hate us not merely for what we are, but also for our ability to survive. Each time they take something from us, we manage, and so they take more until we have nothing left for them to take except what we cannot give up, and then they take that, too. When they put us in ghettos, they thought we would act like rats and devour each other in such a small place. But we survived. So then they put us in an even smaller place, and even smaller after that, and a place finally so small, we turn to dust. Holocaust menu email to Al Sullivan
Read more

3 - I won’t let them take God from me

Image
    I won’t let them take God from me, although I am not a God-fearing man the way my father was, and my brother. I did what I did to honor God the way all boys my age did. But I was a boy with my eye on the world, someone who truly believed I could become whatever I wanted regardless of the blood others said ran through my veins. Others, of course, made it clear I could become only what they said I could become, and so I became that, learning to accept what I could not change, learning to thrive on less so that I might thrive at all. And then that took even that, calling me greedy for clinging to only what I was told I could have, and this, too, I accepted, and did still with even less. When they told me we had to live here, I even accepted my shrinking world as inevitable, until I found it had shrunk to a bunk six of us must share. But by that time, I had shrunk, too, my rattling bones fitting into half the space I thought once as necessary. Even this was too m...
Read more